Monday, April 22, 2013

Sadism and the Horror of Liberty

The Marquis de Sade wrote the world’s most cynical satires. His
pornographic works belong in the Horror section of bookstores, because they illustrate
some grave truths as well as presenting a daunting challenge to modern secularists.
If you wonder why Christians associate atheism and freethinking with
immorality, you might look beyond the Cold War for the source of that
connection, when the atheistic Soviets were demonized by God-fearing Americans.
But in the modern period you’d need to look no further than Sade’s scandalous
advocacy of libertinism. Contemporary
Americans who speak endlessly of the need for freedom seem oblivious to the
fact that they shackle themselves by adhering to cultural norms, including
moral and even legal regulations. The freest individual is, of course, the
fictional character Satan. Lord Satan is the true hero of those whose
highest ideal is personal liberty. (For example, every one of the Nine Satanic
Statements in LaVey’s Satanic Bible is consistent with Sade’s libertinism.) Sade
understood this diabolical end-game of freedom, and so his satires push freedom
of thought and naturalistic philosophy to their furthest reaches. If you’re a critic
of freethinking and naturalism, you’ll happily interpret Sade’s works as reducing
those assumptions to absurdity. By contrast, if you’re an advocate of liberty
in thought and in action, but you reject Sade’s contention that you should
therefore be, in effect, a rabid Satanist and sadist, you have to explain why secular postmodern liberalism doesn't reduce to libertinism. What follows is my critique of Sade’s inversion of morality.

What is Libertinism?

Let’s look first at Sade’s philosophical assumptions and at
libertinism itself. Sade was a rationalist not in the technical Western
philosophical sense that he believed there are innate ideas--although he did
emphasize our instinctive side--but in the broader, progressive sense that he
favoured reason over faith and tradition. Thus, he accepted a science-centered,
naturalistic worldview, according to which the world is made up of ordered
patterns of matter and energy. There are no immaterial spirits, afterlives, miracles,
or gods. In short, Sade was a
materialist, a naturalist, a vehement atheist, and a respecter of science. So how does
he derive sadism from those assumptions?

Here’s my charitable reconstruction of his reasoning. Sade
argues, implicitly or otherwise, not just that everything is natural, but that we ought
to be natural, and here “natural” must be used in two different senses.
Metaphysically, miracles are impossible on his view, but morally speaking,
unnatural behaviour is possible and bad, according to him. As far as I can
tell, natural and thus moral behaviour,
for Sade, is that which copies as much of the natural world as possible and
which therefore gives the lie to the conceit that our species is unique.
Thus, what we ought to do is follow our gut instincts, especially the instinct
to seek pleasure by any means. Pleasure
is our highest good, for Sade, and so he was also a hedonist. But the
reason pleasure should be our ultimate value is that animals in general are
concerned mainly with their own gain, and we should avoid the dualistic
delusion that we’re substantially different from the other species. Moreover, egoism
follows from mechanistic atomism, according to which an atom is independent of
all other atoms and collides violently with others like a billiard ball.

The horrible twist in Sade’s hedonism is that someone who
seeks mainly personal pleasure should offer no apology for taking pleasure in
someone else’s suffering. Again, the reasoning is starkly naturalistic: moral
constraints on egoism are based on dualistic delusions; fundamentally, we are
beasts and so our highest good is to behave as beasts. Moreover, we learn from
biology that species divide into the weak and the strong; the strong prey on
the weak, both between and within species. Thus, there are both predator
species as well as alpha leaders of smaller groups. This is a broad natural
pattern and so not only do we tend to emulate it, but we ought to do so. And so there are strong, wealthy classes of people that
prey on the poor masses. In addition, predatory behaviour is natural and thus
good for the Malthusian reason, which
is that predators are needed to thin the herd, maintain biological variety, and
prevent mass starvation from overpopulation. Predatory people may be diagnosed
with sociopathy, but they can appeal to libertinism and say that their egoistic
mastery of vice and their wholesale contempt for altruistic morality follow
from the modern, Enlightenment assumptions (rationalism, materialism, and so
on).

To be clear, for Sade the predator’s license to prey on the
weak prescribes not just rough sex with a lower class individual, but every
conceivable vice and “crime”--deception, theft, rape, incest, bestiality, and murder
are all encouraged by Sade as long as these acts are accomplished for libertine
ends. Predators have elite wisdom, given their modern insight into the horrific
nature of reality. The real world is materialistic, whereas fanciful notions
about a human’s special worth and otherworldly destiny are fantastic and thus
immoral. Sade thus reverses traditional notions of virtue and vice. What mass
society regards as virtues--asceticism, altruism, mercy, cooperation, empathy,
civility--are actually vices, from the esoteric perspective. For the libertine,
the wise individual is what an ignorant or deluded person might regard as an evil genius, a sort of corrupted Batman,
someone who not only acts on all of his lusts without pity or remorse, but who
has the power and the social connections with likeminded predators, to escape the
wrath of the masses. In the US, for example, the Wall Street plutocrats who
seem too big to fail and who thus threaten to destroy the global economic
system should their Ponzi schemes be regulated and their oligopolies be broken
up in the name of fair competition, would be the best and the brightest in the moral sense--as would all the
amoral math and computer whizzes who flock to Harvard Business School to become
multimillionaires by exploiting the broken economic system.

For Sade’s libertine, anything that curbs private pleasure
is bad, but not everyone can be happy in nature. On the contrary, the atomic
interactions that are at the bottom of all natural processes are indifferent to
moral inequalities; indeed, the gaps between the strong and the weak, the rich
and the poor, and the happy and the miserable may be required by a broader and
thus a normatively higher pattern. Nature is full of inequalities, and so the
more unequal a society may be, the better. The upshot is that libertinism isn’t
fit for everyone, but only for the elite, for the aristocrats, oligarchs, or
autocrats who are strong enough to follow their unbridled impulses with
impunity. If you lack the power to evade, bribe, or otherwise control the
police, for example, you’re better off following herd morality, but this
morality for the weak is, according to the libertine, nothing but a procedure
for being bad. According to Sade, then, selfless people who sacrifice their
lusts to get along with others, because they lack the power to live above the
law, are the unhappiest, while the libertine who is the most free just by being
the most independent is the one who enjoys the most pleasure.

Our highest natural
purpose is to be pleased with life, but since only a minority can fulfill that
purpose in a sustained, heroic way, the masses must settle for second place, by
living as means for the predators’ fulfillment of that end. And here we see
the mechanistic, instrumental side of libertinism. Currently, sadists in the
sexual sphere are infamous for their black leather outfits which are meant to
dehumanize the practitioners and their masochistic partners so that they can be
treated as functionaries in our most natural, beastly game of being masters or slaves. Again, from the materialistic viewpoint, people are
soulless robots carrying out our programming, just as atoms are forced to play
their part in some natural process. Human
societies are mainly games for two classes of robots: slaves serve at the
pleasure of masters, by suffering in the masters’ cruel schemes. All else is
superstitious folly.

The obvious question, then, is how even the masters can be free if we’re all just slaves to our
impulses. Indeed, for Sade there’s no miraculous self-control, but our actions
can be more or less out of line with broader natural patterns. When we act
naturally in that sense, we fulfill our biological and physical purpose and we
live the good life, which is just the most selfishly pleasurable one. When we
act unnaturally, by pretending that
we’re above nature, that we don’t fit into larger biological and physical
patterns, nature punishes us for our error, namely for the effrontery that
deluded people call virtue. Liberty here
is a matter of lacking restraint, of having the courage and the power to do
what you really want to do, if not the power to supernaturally choose your own
desires in violation of natural law. And just as God is supposed to use
even evil-doers to fulfill his grand design, so too nature uses unnatural, “saintly”
people in the furtherance of the game in which we play our roles: again, altruists
serve as sheeple, as slaves whose suffering pleases the sadistic masters. For
the libertine, this is a mechanistic means-end relationship that’s
fundamentally the same as any purely physical process. Just as we hunt weaker
or dumber animals for food or sport, for example, so too the most powerful
people should kill weaker folk for fun or profit. This is because powerful
people ought to have predatory impulses, which means they ought to be sadistic,
to derive pleasure from lesser people’s suffering, to delight in this natural
game that’s played out all around the world throughout our history, including
the Age of Reason.

One other curiosity is how Sade can be a rationalist if he thinks we’re all just
primitive animals or robots. Once again, I think this is only a superficial
inconsistency. Sade is a rationalist with regard to his philosophical
principles, discussed above, but he follows reason up to the point that reason
undermines itself. Reason (the scientific explanation of evidence) shows that we’re
just animals, that we have no immortal essence or supernatural home, just as
science shows we’re part of larger natural processes. So once Enlightenment reason
(freethinking) undermines all religious delusions, cowardice and cheap vanity,
the libertine says reason has played its part in the drama, and our task is to
behave as the beasts we really are. Thus, Sade is a rationalist when it comes
to learning how the real world works, but he’s an irrationalist with regard to
morality. More precisely, Sade implies that reasoning has only instrumental
value, that a wise person will think logically if that’s what’s needed to bring
his fiendish plan to fruition.

False Starts Against Libertinism

When evaluating libertinism, we should distinguish between
two separate but equally interesting questions. First, is libertinism the best
philosophical outlook? Second, do powerful people tend to be libertines as a
matter of fact? I suspect the answer to the second question is that yes,
indeed, powerful people tend to adopt the libertine viewpoint--even if only to
justify their preexisting sociopathy. But whether their sadism or their
philosophical defense comes first is yet another interesting question I won’t
pursue here.

Instead, I want to focus on the first question. Typically,
when a naturalist derives moral prescriptions from a theory of natural facts,
you can expect that the naturalist has committed the naturalistic fallacy, that
she’s just presupposed that prescriptions follow logically from descriptions.
And indeed, I suspect that Sade’s writings are full of naturalistic fallacies. Specifically,
according to my reconstruction, Sade
infers that we ought to recognize our unavoidable role in larger natural
processes, and that when we do so our resulting behaviour is morally best. But
just because a process is broad doesn’t mean it’s best, just as an idea’s
popularity doesn’t make it true. However, this technical point of logic
doesn’t put down the threat that libertinism poses to the softer, gentler
secular philosophy of liberal humanism. No, as I said, Sade seems to understand
what I’ve called the curse of reason. Whether sadism follows logically
from metaphysical naturalism is neither here nor there, given the truth of the
latter, because according to that metaphysical picture, we’re just clever
animals that have a habit of deluding ourselves into thinking that the highest
purpose of our thoughts is to be logical. Not so, says the powerful person who
uses logic and fallacies alike as instruments in the Machiavellian manipulation of people, by way of making the most
fun moves in the game of life. In any case, Sade has another ready response to
this charge, which is that libertinism is the only morality left standing after
the Enlightenment showed that altruistic moralities are the ones that rest not
just on technical errors of reasoning but on whopping delusions of
supernaturalism.

So I’m going to leave aside the naturalistic fallacy
objection. Am I, then, a libertine? Well, I share Sade’s philosophical
naturalism and respect for science. Of course, science has moved on from the
mechanistic worldview. As quantum mechanics shows, atoms are as much
interrelated (entangled) waves as they are independent, ego-like particles. So
physics is no longer suited to crude social Darwinism. A liberal secular
humanist’s main objection to libertinism, though, would be that the Age of
Reason doesn’t end in Sade’s cynicism, that reason shows we’re cooperative
beings who enter into a social contract precisely because such self-restraint is
in our narrow interest, the alternative being anarchy and indeed what Hobbes
called the state of nature, which is the state that Sade says is inescapable. (There
are other contenders for rationalist morality, such as utilitarianism, Rawls’
defense of the welfare state, and so forth, but I’ll focus here on the idea of
the social contract.)

Now, on my charitable interpretation of libertinism, I think
this liberal, egalitarian philosophy falters for a Straussian reason that’s
implicit in Sade’s critique of polite society. According to Leo Strauss’s
reading of the ancient Greek philosophers, philosophy subverts the delusions
needed to sustain social ties. Therefore, philosophers need to maintain “noble”
fictions so that the unphilosophical majority can continue to productively
participate in the society that sustains the philosopher’s elite, cynical
lifestyle. I trust you can see how similar this is to Sade’s (and Nietzsche’s)
view of masters and slaves.(Hegel’s
discussion of the master-slave dialectic precedes the latter two’s, but Hegel’s
is less interesting because he appeals to a deus
ex machina in the necessity of more and more self-consciousness.) According
to Sade, there are and have always been masters and slaves, two broad classes
of people, just as there are predatory and servile species. True, predators and
sadists need the meeker creatures, but if they’re sufficiently clever they can
have it both ways: they can abuse the weak masses even as they pretend to cave
in to the demand for a social contract, for a society of laws and traditional
morality. Like vampires, sadists can practice their higher morality in secret.

As for finding evidence of this, we could look to the likely
answer to that second question I posed. If powerful people do tend to think and secretly act as libertines, and have always
done so in all parts of the world, we might well suspect that any defense of
egalitarianism or of altruism that becomes conventional wisdom is the
perpetuation of a noble lie. At least, regardless of the evidence or logic in
favour of something like the US Bill of Rights, we’d have the competing fact
that all societies tend to map onto the grotesque pattern of the masters and
slaves in their respective positions in the dominance hierarchy. We could
aspire to some higher-minded society, but the point is that if we’re beholding
a large-scale natural process here, we should take a second look at any
altruistic metanarrative, including any scientistic one, such as the one you
find in economics and game theory which uses fancy mathematics to cloak its
normative and thus largely artistic nature. After all, the notion that selfish
people ought to sign onto a social compromise for their own good assumes that
selfish people should err on the side of caution, as John Rawls says. But very
powerful people can throw caution to the wind because they’re too big for
society to let fail or to imprison; they become parasites, the hidden Lovecraftian
gods whose intentions and lifestyles are alien and therefore monstrous to those
of the struggling dupes.

The Existential Choice: Collusion with Horrible Nature or
Tragic Rebellion?

Anyway, even if there were rational and naturalistic
defenses of morality, Sade would have a fallback position which is that reason doesn’t make itself our ultimate
ideal. Even were there some calculations showing that our selfish pleasure
is maximized by helping rather than harming others, who says our behaviour
ought to be rational, first and foremost? Logic and science alone don’t tell us
what we should do. When Sade says we’re animals, he’s pointing to our primitive
instincts as the motives we should follow, because they put us in touch with
natural reality. This is what we might
call Sade’s standard of existential
authenticity: natural behaviour is the beastly kind that matches the most
universal, metaphysical pattern in nature, whereas unnatural, altruistic actions put us at odds with natural forces and so lead to our unhappiness,
as nature punishes saints by creating predators to humiliate them or to hunt
them down for sport. Even if you’re armed with fancy philosophical
arguments for altruism, you have to care
about those arguments to let them guide your life outside of the Academy or of your
anonymous speeches in internet chat rooms. You have to feel that we should be
logical in our dealings with others and with our inclinations, and any such
feeling will have to compete with our wilder, more ancient and technically
fallacious impulses. When it comes to motivating us, the lizard brain beats the
cerebral cortex, as does any technique that capitalizes on the Throne of
Emotion on which sits the hypocritical god of Logos.

So when I consider libertinism I want to compare Sade’s
hero, the sadistic master of weak people, with a different one, namely the rebellious
ascetic and altruist, and I want this comparison to play out according to
aesthetic ground rules. Which narrative
makes for the better story, Sade’s farce
of the monstrous instrumental relation between masters and slaves or the tragedy of rebelling against any such relation
for the sake of another natural ideal, that of artistic integrity? After
all, naturalists after Darwin have moved on from the creationist, platonic
assumption that forms are eternal; even were there a broad natural conflict
between masters and slaves, this conflict needn’t be permanent. There’s
continuity between naturally selected species and between social classes, so we
can be moved by the prospect of rebelling against some universals for the sake
of evolving new ones. The problem with Sade’s mechanistic interpretation of
natural processes is that he misses the mystery of cosmic undeadness. An actual
machine is spiritless and robotic, because the machine is the handiwork of a
mind, and we can see the mind infuse her intentions into the machine’s
functions. But there’s no mind behind the universe and nature creates and
changes itself, from the chaotic quantum fluctuations up to the cosmic dance of
spiraling galaxies.

My point here is that there are two equally naturalistic
stories to tell. There’s Sade’s social Darwinism, assuming for the sake of
argument that we have selfish impulses and that there’s an unsettling order in
our history of cynical elites preying on deluded weaklings. But there’s also a
naturalistic, nonrational defense of altruism (or at least of a rejection of
sadism), which I call existential cosmicism. We can concede that reason has
little to do with morality, but maintain that we ought to rebel against nature
rather than attempting to emulate the heartlessness of natural forces. Sade’s
satires excel at showing the hypocrisy of elites who must wear the mask of
Christian moralism in public while effectively worshipping Satan in private,
when they scheme for Machiavellian control and engage in all manner of
perverted sexual adventures. Exposing this hypocrisy makes for great comedy.
But there’s a reason comedies seldom win an Oscar for Best Picture, and it’s
not just a matter of Hollywood politics. Likewise, there’s a reason
Shakespeare’s tragedies are more highly regarded than his comedies, and theists
are moved more by depictions of hell than of heaven. Even comedians are known
for doing their best work when they’re miserable, and indeed the greatest art
emerges as sublimations of suffering.

The best art speaks to the horrors and tragedies in the
world, not just because fear and disgust are powerful emotions, but because we feel that the whole universe won’t end
well, theistic fantasies notwithstanding. Theists speak of the coming
kingdom of God, but talk is cheap and myths have to earn their emotional power
by engaging honestly with reality; otherwise, the myths become corrupting
dogmas. God is nowhere to be found, whereas we confront death every day, whether
in the death of the animals or plants we eat or in that of people in the
news or in our personal life. Heraclitus was right when he spoke of change as
being at the heart of Being. The seasons change and whole solar systems and
even galaxies come and go in their time. The universe too will go. Perhaps
elsewhere in the multiverse another universe will spring into being, but the
point is that everything in nature has a beginning, a middle, and an end--just like a story. Endings make for tragedies: the heroes all die, because everything ends
before having a chance to culminate in some godlike state beyond Death’s reach.
Thus, the greatest art is tragedy because it speaks to the finite structure of
natural being.

Although Sade’s satires don’t end happily for the slaves,
from the slaves’ perspective, in a sense his works do have happy endings,
because from nature’s viewpoint, as it were, everything works as it should: all
our natural functions are served, whether we’re masters or slaves, and when
masters are pleased to bring about the suffering of slaves, our greatest good
is achieved. To be sure, this is horrifying comedy, because it overturns the
noble lie about morality, which is the Enlightenment convention that everyone
has the right to be a liberated and happy master. Still, Sade’s philosophy ends
happily for everyone in the mechanistic sense that we all fulfill our necessary
functions in our service to nature. If we strive to be selfless because of some
alleged supernatural calling, we only set ourselves up to be prey for those who
aren’t so gullible.

By contrast, rebellious detachment is about making the best of
our hopeless situation. We’re doomed to extinction and there’s no cavalry or angelic
host waiting in the wings to save us. Our noblest, most honourable course is to
sublimate existential horror and create the best artworks with the raw
materials of our ideas and our life decisions (as well as creating paintings,
songs, novels, and so forth). If we’re naturally inclined to be selfish and
beastly, we can choose to detach from those impulses and to rebel against the
genes and other natural forces, and achieve the freedom of artistic independence. For
Sade, freedom is going with the flow of cruel nature, whereas for the
existential rebel, freedom is being as unnatural as possible for the sake of
creating tragic art.

Here the rebel may have the last laugh against the
libertine. For Sade, altruists are deluded fools whom elite masters use as
pawns in nature’s game that rewards the winners with sadistic pleasure. But for
the existential cosmicist, the elite master hardly fares much better than the
slave in the long run. Although the master’s life may be full of pleasure and
the slave’s full of suffering, even Sade should grant that nature uses both in
its elaboration of some larger process. For example, now we know about genetics
and natural selection. So there should be some awkwardness in the Satanist’s or
sadist’s self-glorification and revelry in the downfall of slaves since, being
a naturalist, the master must realize that she’s doomed as well and is merely a
plaything of undead natural forces. So the choice is (1) to conform to a
global pattern, to be liberated by surrendering to our primitive impulses and accepting
our permanent position in the dominance hierarchy or (2) to rebel against those
Fates, to reinforce our uniqueness as a species and as individuals, to be
original and so to earn the highest aesthetic honours. We can say Yes to the
worst in the world or we can say No and try to create something both new and
tragic and thus aesthetically better than what’s given to us.

For these reasons, I think that, compared to libertinism, the
philosophy of existential cosmicism makes for the more appealing myth,
aesthetically speaking. Even though I share some assumptions with Sade, I’m
unmoved by his prescription of sadism. I’d feel no joy in torturing a pitiful
creature, because I understand that I’m equally pitiful. We’re all in the same
existential boat, masters and slaves alike. Sadists delude themselves when they
forget that, at best, they’re big fish in a little pond, predators in a game
played out on a backwoods planet. In the ocean of natural processes in which we
swim, we’re all sinking. Shall I step on someone’s head to enjoy a few more
breaths, to delay my drowning or even to live for years on an island made up of
the backs of slaves? Or shall I attempt to show how all sufferers can make the
best of their plight, by exploring the power of tragic art to give us a higher
sort of pleasure, to turn our fear and loathing into the artist’s bittersweet creativity?
I choose the latter, because sadism sickens me and this is because the
libertine’s true master is the abomination of a merely undead god.

22 comments:

I like how you contrast your existential rebel with Sade's libertine. Both are very insightful positions and like you I reject the sadists kind libertinism. For it's the easier way and creates no art. Being an artist, I believe I couldn't stand to live a life only for pleasure. It sounds so boring. Where is the excitement of adventure? The feeling of insignificans by looking at the nightsky or from a high mountain? Those are the things I value more in live. But maybe that's only my slaves perspective :-)Either way one thing that strikes me as noteworthy is that the master depends on his slaves. Without them he would be a nothing, whereas a slave without a master has the potential to shape the world in a way the master couldn't even think to do.

Thanks! It's often said, though, that slaves need their masters just as much as masters need their slaves--at least in the context of sadomasochism. Masochists get off on being dominated. But even in the rest of society, there may be followers who prefer being led; they don't want to make the big decisions and they just want to keep their head down and follow the rules. Then there are the ambitious, alpha types who prefer to be in the spotlight and to manage large groups of people. And this is very politically incorrect, but racists will say that entire races are fit only to be dominated by more go-getter races.

Yeah, I agree that it depends on the context. A key point in this might be how you see yourself and others, if you define yourself/others with the major characteristic of being master/slave or just as people who happen to be on one side of the spectrum.I think the preference of being led doesn't automatically make one a real slave, but one can then be seen/see oneself as one. The same is true for being a master. You can be a leader without seeing yourself seperated from those that are led.I think both, defining yourself as a master or a slave, are illusory. Every master might one day get into a situation where he/she acquires the role of a slave, likewise a slave might one day become a leader. A quote from The Song of Ice and Fire comes to mind: "Power resides where men believe it resides. No more no less."The master is in this case in the position of an optimist. When reality proves her/him wrong, he might get negative feelings, for what he could achieve before he can't anymore.The slave is the pessimists. When reality proves him/her wrong, it might result in a positive emotion, for then she/he might see his/her true potential.So the master is better off when in an illusory state, where the slave is better off a realistic state. This reasoninig might exlpain my preference for slave-thinking.

In religion, people create gods to give them the feeling of something bigger, and a hope for an escape from mortality. Outside of religion, some feel the need to makes themselves feel bigger through money, power, etc. If they have a giant mansion, it helps them forget that they are but a speck in the universe. Worse yet, a speck that is conscious that it's a speck. No matter how one chooses to distract themselves from the truth, the truth doesn't change. In my opinion nature is dumb, crude and disgusting, certainly not worthy of emulation.

I agree, but I think it's very important that we understand what we reject, which is why I tried to make the best case I could for Sade before explaining why I don't aspire to be a libertine. If I'm right, the most powerful people have always been much more like libertines than Buddhas, and it's not so easy for liberal secular humanists to agree with the libertine's naturalism and then to justify politically correct morality (since as John Gray says, that morality is borrowed from monotheism).

I don't think humans need religion to make moral judgments, slavery is a good example. Slavery is not only not condemned in the Abrahamic religions, there are actually rules for how one should treat a slave. Including the proper amount of times a slave can be struck, and yet humans outlawed slavery. At least overt, chattel slavery. Maybe I'm just too mired in Buddha, Zappfe, and Shopenhauer, but Libertinism just seems like another futile attempt to extract meaning from life. It also seems to be enslaving, as one becomes a slave to their senses/pleasures, which have a diminishing return over time. The moment humans were able to recognize that other feeling things suffer, was the moment we ceased to be animals, or even be natural for that matter. I doubt a hawk is aware of how much pain it's inflicting on a rabbit, much less associate that pain with itself.

I think this is a good point, about the uniqueness of empathy. Social Darwinians, sadists, Satanists, and others who say we ought to be beastly, because beastliness is most natural seem to assume that uniqueness is anomalous and therefore a sort of fake miracle. On my reading, their point is that we should stop pretending to be unnatural, because we're really just like the other animals. But the truth is that our brain is divided against itself, that the lower, older parts of our brain do supply us with instincts and emotions that many other species have, while the cerebral cortex makes us rare, giving us language, forethought, and so on.

It seems like the pursuit of unrestrained hedonism, is another attempt at limiting consciousness. By focusing on physical indulgence, one becomes anchored in the body, and ultimately the earth. One could make the argument, that the high level of consciousness that humans experience is the most natural human state. Attempts to limit or tamp it down, are in fact what is unnatural.

But the reason pleasure should be our ultimate value is that animals in general are concerned mainly with their own gain, and we should avoid the dualistic delusion that we’re substantially different from the other species.

I read down to the 'read more' break, so you can shoot me down based on that.

But I rather suspect animals don't avoid their dualistic notion they are different from those not of their species. If a lion pounces on you, do you really think it thinks you are one of them?

I'd contend Sade is falling back on an animal innocence he no longer possesses - that cherry popped quite some time back.

It might be dualistic delusion - but there's a difference between being deluded and simply pretending to be deluded. Sade's just doing the latter.

I guess one place I am struggling with your philosophy, Benjamin, is an implicit assumption that it is always "society", "the culture", etc. which is flawed. Versus the heroic loner "artist" who refuses to buy into the mythology, etc. etc. etc. Why is this objectively so? What if the art is banal and nonsense, or even violent? The various bombers and murderous revolutionaries certainly believe this, and your philosophy may offer them no clear arguments.

I am inspired by a brief snippet from history enthusing about a gang of "anarchists" who were so appalled by their society that they went around and killed people, including 'timid, unworthy" bank clerks. I guess they deserved to die at the hands of the "anarchist bandits" because they bought into their social roles (to some extent).

This may be my philistinism., but I am less convinced that "artists" provide as much insight as they may think they do. I know that you have addressed the banality of modern art.

This is rambling quite a bit (typing on the fly while at work) so forgive me.

While Mr. Cain will undoubtedly acquit himself with more eloquence than I can manage, I have to respectfully disagree with you. I read this blog pretty regularly (it's my favorite!) and I think he has made it quite clear on numerous occasions that he is using a different yardstick to judge the worth of a given topic.

To take society in general, he more or less begins with the assumption of metaphysical naturalism. From there, a number of objective facts follow, such as the fact that we are products of natural selection and that our bodies are primarily vehicles for the transmission of genes. If you follow him this far, then a number of widely-held ideas about what one "ought" to do are cut down.

Furthermore, to be fair to him, if you do not accept his starting points at face value--for example, if you are a Christian who does not accept naturalism (since you believe that God created the universe and imbued it with His spirit), then you will reach different conclusions. Neither of you will be wrong (except to the extent that you press the Christian on their rejection of naturalism).

I take your point, Brian, but I don't think I say or imply here that artists, introverts, mystics, and omegas are *always* or *necessarily* in the right and that social conventions are always bad. Granted, though, I usually defend the outsider against society.

But there are two points to keep in mind here. First, I'm trying to shift the balance, because there's an awful lot of energy that goes into promoting social conventions, politically correct myths, and so on. The weight of society's defense of itself can crush the outsider. Who speaks up for the latter? For example, as you point out, I have an article on artists ("The Vacuity of Postmodern Art") and in that article there's a link pointing to the economic fact that however romantic artists may seem in the Hollywood image, artists aren't actually doing well in the West. People aren't putting their money where their mouth is. So there's society's myth and then there's the sad fact about outsiders. I'm trying to swing the pendulum the other way, by speaking up for the social outsider, since his megaphone is much smaller than society's.

Second, and even more importantly, I think, I'm not saying that the social outsider is *actually* better than society or anything like that. Instead, I'm talking about an ideal for that sort of person. I concede your point, that artists and other outsiders can do horrible things and even that they may tend to do so. What I want to explore, though, are the ideals, the prescriptions about what those people and indeed everyone else *should* be doing. I'm discussing how people can make the best of the worst-case scenario, which scenario begins with naturalism and continues on to the existential predicament that everyone ought to face.

What's my prescription? Some detachment from the delusions that society tends to propagate for various reasons, to accept some suffering as raw material for the production of more tragic and creative art, including the art of our ideologies and lifestyles themselves. Just as artists need to suffer a little for their art, so everyone needs to suffer to live creatively and nobly, because suffering is the result of facing up to our dire existential situation and we face that situation when we look at things objectively, which requires detachment and thus alienation and angst (suffering).

So because my case is a normative one, I can agree with you that many outsiders don't live up to the ideal. Perhaps you're suspicious of the ideal, though, since you think it's pro-outsider and anti-society. Well, I'm not an anarchist, but I would like societies to change.

As for how much insight an outsider has, it's just a matter of objectivity, the view from nowhere and the curse of reason. But that only shows us the absurdity of what we used to take for granted. As to the creative vision of what to do about our existential plight, that's a much harder problem and I'd agree that not all outsiders have good answers. That's why I'd like to see a new religion take hold that inspires outsiders with myths (emotionally powerful fictions) that address these themes and give us all some direction.

Do you have a post which characterises this "new religion" you speak of? I quess, this is what the whole Undead God thing is about :-)You write quite often about Scientsm being kind of a religion, but that doesn't seem to be what you have in mind by your new religion?

Hi Dietl. Yes, this is what existential cosmicism is about, so all the articles under that heading in the Map of the Rants would be relevant. But one that directly addresses the question of a new religion and that makes a very important point is an early one I wrote, "Inkling of an Unembarrassing Postmodern Religion." The important point is that I don't take myself to be creating the needed myths or starting the religion. I'm only trying to explore the issues and the preconditions. If anything, I'd say religions may begin as cults led by visionary or bizarre individuals, but then they must emerge as collective phenomena; they must speak to the spirit of the time and their myths must distill cultural values and longings.

What's my prescription? Some detachment from the delusions that society tends to propagate for various reasons, to accept some suffering as raw material for the production of more tragic and creative art, including the art of our ideologies and lifestyles themselves. Just as artists need to suffer a little for their art, so everyone needs to suffer to live creatively and nobly, because suffering is the result of facing up to our dire existential situation and we face that situation when we look at things objectively, which requires detachment and thus alienation and angst (suffering).

Benjamin: I think the paragraph above is certainly excellent.

Ryan...Rants is one of my favorite blogs as well (I am definitely a Misotheistic Gnostic, if anything and in no way a Christian), so I am not "disagreeing" with Benjamin, I just tend towards contrarianism. :)

My question was indeed inspired by the horrific mindset of the anarchist bank robbers and their casual disregard for others' "inferior" lives, although Benjamin has made very clear that his ethos is based on a sense of tragic sympathy.

Our highest natural purpose is to be pleased with life, but since only a minority can fulfill that purpose in a sustained, heroic way, the masses must settle for second place, by living as means for the predators’ fulfillment of that end.

What does a super hero need to remain that awesome person? Super villains who terrorises the masses.

I don't think it makes heroes sadists, if that's what you're suggesting. Not all instrumental (means-end) relationships amount to the sadomasochistic one. The movie Unbreakable takes up your point (where there's a hero there's a supervillain). In comics I think it's more like the Star Wars good vs bad side of the Force. The lesson is supposed to be that great power doesn't determine our moral qualities. The comic book myth that I question is that a good person can be very powerful for long without becoming corrupt.

In fact, this myth may warrant its own blog post. Some of my favourite rants/articles that I've written started from ideas I got while responding to comments on my blog, so I thank you very much for raising issues I might not have thought of on my own.

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In this blog you'll find my philosophical rants within the undead god. What on earth is the "undead god," you ask, and why do I rant within it? Read on and find out or just look at how the planet and all of nature mindlessly evolve, setting the stage for our existential predicament. In the big picture, who I am doesn't matter at all and when I write here I write mostly with the big picture in mind. But if you're curious about some of my interests, see my blogger profile.